XNA Demos: First Impressions, Pt. 1
Before my take is completely washed over by an assault of white noise from the echo chamber (I can feel my inner ear giving way already), I wanted to post my first impressions on the recent XNA demo launches. The select few that I played gave me faith in the little guys. Small game developers often have the most glorious ideas because, for the most part, they're like us. They want to have fun playing games. The money is irrelevant when you're coding out of hobbyist fervor - so, instead of stale franchises sucking the life out of our collective gamer soul, you get interesting, novel games.
Hit the jump for short blurbs on the first three game demos I played and my assessment as to whether you should waste your hard-earned Microsoft Points on them if/when they hit the actual XBLA stage.
Culture
Imagine the tactile feeling you get playing a game like Katamari. Now, merge that with the brightly colored cuteness of Viva Pinata. That's Culture. Simply put, the game is a globe that's constantly growing weeds. By planting circles of the same colored flowers around the weeds, you eradicate them. You progress to the next level when all the weeds are eliminated form the globe, and you "gain" additional flower colors to plant - which is really more of a curse than a gift. The flowers grow at different densities and speeds, giving you less time to draw circles with the same color. The challenge combined with the visuals here are just stunningly awesome.
Culture comes with two additional mini-games that are affected by how you perform in the one I just described. A paint-by-flowers game where you can unlock new pictures to paint, and a garden where you can unlock new flowers to breed.
Buy? As soon as you can get your grubby little globe-spinning paws on it.
The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai
Downloader Beware: The Dishwasher demo is really only one level that will take you roughly 8 minutes to get through. But, those 8 minutes might be the most fun you have playing a game in a long time.
I played the story mode, that essentially adds a neat comic strip cut-scenes to the beginning of each stanza. Dishwasher, though, is a fast-action platformer that plays more like a really gory fighting game. Envision current XBLA title Alien Hominid if you replaced the cute aliens with a gruesome, disheveled ghost-man, gave him two meat cleavers instead of a ray gun, and made the enemies a hell of a lot easier.
The beauty of Dishwasher is in the setting - highly stylized, post-apocalyptic textures - the perfect backdrops for hacking and slashing your way through nondescript suit enemies and performing messy kills.
Buy? If you enjoy having fun, then an emphatic "Yes".
Rocketball
When I saw this title in the XNA section I thought, how could I go wrong? It's a dodgeball game. Sounds like good times, right? Wrong! Rocketball is a complete waste of time. The graphics are passable. Outside of that, some major flaws bog down the whole experience.
The biggest knock I have on this - what should be a simple game with tight controls - is how non-intuitively the basic actions are mapped to the controller. "Pick up ball" and "Throw ball" are mapped to different buttons, "Dodge" is mapped to the triggers instead of the left stick, etc. Seriously, when dodgeball is easier to play in real life than on a video game, the developers have missed the point entirely.
Another huge problem is that each side of the court is confined to crippling rows instead of being an open plot to run around as you will. This makes the unintuitive controls an even bigger problem when the opponent essentially has a 50/50 chance to hit you when you're fumbling around for the right button to pick up a ball.
I seriously could only stomach 5 minutes of this before surrendering my controller to the floor in disgust.
Buy? I will personally come to your house and punch you in the face if you buy this.
Stay tuned for Part 2 in this series whenever I have the patience to download the rest of the XNA Demos. If you've beat me to some of the other ones already, post your impressions in the comments.
What say you?!